Joe Deville | Lancaster University (original) (raw)

Books by Joe Deville

Consumer credit borrowing – using credit cards, store cards and personal loans – is an important ... more Consumer credit borrowing – using credit cards, store cards and personal loans – is an important and routine part of many of our lives. But what happens when these everyday forms of borrowing go ‘bad’, when people cannot, or will not, repay? It is this poorly understood, controversial, but central part of both the consumer credit industry and the lived experiences of an increasing number of people that this book explores.

Drawing on research from the interior of the debt collections industry, it examines precisely how this ever more sophisticated, globally connected market functions. It focuses on the intimate techniques used to try and recoup defaulting debts from borrowers, as well as on the collection industry’s relationship with lenders. Looking at the issue of consumer credit default from the point of view of both the borrower and the collector, Joe Deville follows a journey of default, from debtors’ accounts of their borrowing practices, to the intrusion of collections technologies into their homes and everyday lives, to debtors’ attempts to seek outside help.

By opening up for scrutiny an area of the economy which is often hidden from view, this book makes a major contribution to understanding the role of consumer credit in our societies and economies. This book will be of interest to students, teachers and researchers in a range of fields, including sociology, anthropology, economics, and social psychology.

Papers by Joe Deville

The Sociology of Debt, 2019

This chapter introduces a phenomenon I call 'digital subprime'. This is a domain that represents ... more This chapter introduces a phenomenon I call 'digital subprime'. This is a domain that represents a rapidly developing frontier in lenders' quest for predictive power involving a growing group of well-funded technology startups who are entering subprime, payday lending markets in various different countries and are lending at high rates of interest to borrowers who often have either poor credit histories or, in some cases, no credit histories at all. In this new variant of consumer credit lending, we see the exploitation of diverse forms of online data, processed through forms of algorithmic analysis, in the attempt to better predict the repayment behaviour of individuals. This data often appears extremely mundane and to have very little to do with the credit product in hand. Data points can range from a user's IP (Internet Protocol) address, to the particular browser they use, to their screen resolution, to information accessed via social media accounts. In examining this new economic phenomenon, the paper presents results from a project that uses digital methods to try to track the trackers being deployed. The chapter seeks to map the terrain of possibility represented by the diverse forms of data that are rendered accessible to lenders, partly as a basis for future research, and partly to highlight key developments in the present and future ontologies of money.

Geoforum, 2019

Accounting for the geographies of debt may require types of empirical and theoretical analysis se... more Accounting for the geographies of debt may require types of empirical and theoretical analysis sensitive to the integrated character of relations of debt ‘situation’. Analysing debt situations opens up the possibility of questioning the manner in which a particular debt encounter or circumstance is composed in its relation to others, the texture of which can fade from view when attempts are made to delimit where an encounter begins or ends, either spatially or temporally. In the process, attention is drawn to the importance of understanding both the situated character of life in debt and the variation in how the binds of debt are constituted, which can on occasion be more fragile than expected.

Speculative research: The lure of possible futures, 2017

How did money emerge? This simple question is one that has aroused intense debate amongst a group... more How did money emerge? This simple question is one that has aroused intense debate amongst a group of researchers interested in the role that money plays in contemporary socio-economic life. The problem for these researchers, however, is that the answer is lost in the mists of deep human time. No one really knows. This has not, however, impeded attempts to answer the question. It’s just that these answers have, inevitably, had to engage in a considerable amount of speculation. This is speculation not in relation to uncertain futures, but uncertain pasts—not forecasting but ‘retrocasting’.
This paper has two parts. First it analyses the way that the speculative work is done within this research. To do so, it analyses three specific speculative interventions. The first comes from mainstream economics, in which it is usually argued that money would have emerged ‘spontaneously’ as a natural progression from barter. The second is associated with ‘credit theory’, a particular branch of monetary theory, which argues that money could not have existed without first what must have been important is so called ‘money of account’ – a calculative framework for the comparison of value. The hunt then turns to what these pre-monetary frameworks might have been. And the third is from a strand of heterodox economics, which invokes an imagined encounter between two parties, each ‘foreign’ to each other, which would have necessitated a third, mutually intelligible entity.
This will remain likely remain an ultimately intractable problem. Nonetheless, in the second part, I add into the mix some further speculative propositions of my own– and sketch some alternative ways in which we might imagine the origins of money, by attending to the processual materiality of the transactional object itself and, specifically, the ‘lure’ of money. To do so, I will draw on and, to a degree, reinterpret Marilyn Strathern’s account of a ‘first contact’ encounter between Australian explorers and the Hageners of the Wahgi Valley of Papua New Guinea in 1933. In and around this episode, we see the radical reconstitution of monies, subjects, objects, and the attendant ethico-political socio-economic landscape in ways that cross-cut but also shed new light on some of the themes raised by the previous three speculative interventions.

British Journal of Sociology, 2017

Debates on risk have largely assumed risk to be the outcome of calculative practices. There is a ... more Debates on risk have largely assumed risk to be the outcome of calculative practices. There is a related assumption that risk objects come only in one form, and that the reason not everything can be transformed into a risk is because of the difficulties in calculating and creating universal quantitative comparisons. In this article, building on recent studies of preparedness that have broadened understandings of risk, we provide an analysis of how preparedness measures might themselves produce risk, in particular through risk’s durable instantiation, or what we call ‘concretisation’. Our empirical focus is on how government agencies in two countries shifted their attention from the risk of nuclear attack during the Cold War to an all hazards approach to preparedness. Comparing the mid- to late-twentieth century histories of the UK and Switzerland, we show that both countries shifted from focusing from a single risk to plural risks. This shift cannot be explained by a change in prevailing calculative practices, or by the fact that the risks changed historically. Instead, it is driven by historically specific changes in how risks are produced and reproduced in relation to how materialisations of risk operate over time.

Markets and the Arts of Attachment, 2017

What might it mean to say that the market will have you? This chapter tackles this question by us... more What might it mean to say that the market will have you? This chapter tackles this question by using Gabriel Tarde’s central provocation that what we are, our identities, are not matters of ‘being’ but of ‘having’. The art of markets lies in how this having – of data, relations, associations, ties, ‘us’ – is practically accomplished. We test this idea by looking at how marketing conversations have been conducted in two consumer finance product cases: the industrial life assurance company Prudential Assurance and the payday loan company Wonga. These two cases, we argue, shed new light both on how we understand market attachment and what this might mean in a rapidly evolving digital economy.

Markets and the Arts of Attachment, 2017

One story sociologists and political economists tell about marketing is that it manufactures desi... more One story sociologists and political economists tell about marketing is that it manufactures desire for things that people would not otherwise want. As Karl Marx (1980) famously explained, products get their finishing touches only in consumption. Marketing is an integral part of the distribution of action that defines production and consumption by orchestrating markets. As practiced in the wild, marketing also concerns the build, design, pricing and placing of the thing itself. This means that markets and marketing are in it together and that people are in their products from the start. In this Introduction we outline what we mean by the ‘arts of market attachment’ using the motif of the Apple Watch before introducing how our various contributors make sense of the arts and devices of markets.

The Book of Payments Historical and Contemporary Views on the Cashless Society, 2016

This chapter sheds light on the materiality of payment devices. It makes a simple proposition: th... more This chapter sheds light on the materiality of payment devices. It makes a simple proposition: that the matter of money – the tangible qualities of sets of transactional objects and how they are handled and move around – matters. This is illustrated by examining two forces to which money is connected. The first is adaptation, and concerns changes over time in the stuff of money itself, the transformations payment devices have had to undergo to function successfully as money. The second is calculation, and relates to how exactly the material properties of money, once settled, might shape the financial decisions we make. With respect to the latter, the chapter shows that money may not be as transparent a medium as is so often thought.

New Formations, 2016

The age of austerity has seen large swathes of society adversely affected by ever-harsher austeri... more The age of austerity has seen large swathes of society adversely affected by ever-harsher austerity measures and protracted economic stagnation. This is compounded by the increasing routinisation of debt default and the everyday management of problematic levels of debt. This paper explores the everyday politics of indebtedness—the multifaceted ways in which household debt is transforming debtors' lives—and the forms of resistance it can give rise to. In particular we focus on the role played in the UK by online resources as a new and increasingly important source of expertise and collaborative support. The paper's object is a set of web forums that offer platforms for peer-to-peer (p2p) information exchange, specifically: Consumer Action Group, Money Saving Expert, Mumsnet. We analyse the types of expertise that are made available, how this is discussed and achieves legitimacy (or not), as well as the forums' effects on forms of domestic accounting. We also compare the online forms of debt advice to conventional 'real world' debt management expertise. We conclude by considering how this enhances our understanding of the transformative impact of digital technologies on indebtedness as well as offering insights into the everyday life of contemporary austerity.

Algorithmic Life: Calculative Devices in the Age of Big Data (Edited by Louise Amoore & Volha Piotukh), 2015

This paper presents the results of a project that sought to explore the forms of data potentially... more This paper presents the results of a project that sought to explore the forms of data potentially used by digital payday lending sites -- what we call 'digital subprime - to assist in their credit assessment processes. In so doing, it focuses on the automated, unseen, digital work undertaken by ‘trackers’ (other terms include ‘bugs’, ‘pixels’, ‘tags’). These are online data gathering tools, many provided by third party providers, activated when a user visits a particular website. It draws on a form of digital method by deploying the ‘tracker tracker’ tool as a way of dealing with the practical and political challenges of attempting to understand the logics of an algorithm from the outside.

Cultural Studies, 2015

Lived relations to credit and debt can steadily sink into the everyday in ways that are often mis... more Lived relations to credit and debt can steadily sink into the everyday in ways that are often missed in analyses that attend to the more immediately visible and eventful aspects of financial existence. How might one address those less remarked-upon, extra-‘ordinary’ lived moments of credit and debt: moments that can come, when all is added up, to say much more about the weight of the day-to-day and, thus, offer – by their very intimacy – the surest potential for their own transformation? Encounters between the monetary and the mundane transpire in all kind of ways, through all manner of instruments/practices, arrangements/assemblages, moralities/affects, rhythms/routines, and across vastly different contexts and registers (familial, communal, gendered, racial, national, global, etc). We argue that only by adhering closely to the empirical contents of one’s immediate situation, as always crossed by the abstractions of theory, does it become possible to grasp in all its temporal and scalar diversity the ‘big picture’, a totality that might begin to unite these fragments and moments that otherwise escape continuously into the background.
Our contributors speak from out of very specific sets of circumstances, histories, and intimacies: with essays that take the reader into the decision-making practices at Portuguese retail banks, the mortgage worries of residents in new-build homes in Warsaw Poland, American military families and their struggles with debt management, the lives of mamapreneurs working a ‘fourth shift,’ the tactical use of credit and debt in the slums of Buenos Aires, the bookkeeping practices of merchants in a Russian small town, the troubling subterranean history of today’s philanthrocapital, Hungarian home borrowers’ sense of futurity, the stylistics of household consumption in Chile, the appetites that drive financial apps, leverage’s force-affects on space and time, and the complicated hopefulness of the Rolling Jubilee.
Together, these essays provide an empirics of indebtedness traversing the diverse social, affectual, and material terrain of the everyday. This editors’ introduction draws from their coordinates and atmospheres to enact a way of thinking across them: a way to gather up the residual, the unnoticed, the moment and the whole, in order to capture ‘something more’ of everyday debt and credit, not only as it passes but also in what it portends.

Consumption Markets and Culture, 2014

Existing accounts of consumer credit market making have done much to explore the business models,... more Existing accounts of consumer credit market making have done much to explore the business models, technologies and advertising practices of lenders, and the financial circumstances of borrowers. However, the space of interface between consumer credit debtor and debt collector remains underexplored. Drawing on interviews with debtors and an exposition of debt collections technologies, the paper demonstrates how this market domain, in seeking to prompt calculative engagement, depends on its ability to intersect successfully with the everyday lives of economic agents. Critically engaging with key currents emerging out of the ‘economization’ programme it builds on its attention to the socio-material mechanisms of market making. However, the paper argues that materially sensitive economic sociologies need to account more thoroughly for the place of affect in markets. This is particularly relevant when studying consumer markets, where exchanges routinely centre on intimate and embodied encounters between economic actors.

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2012

Drawing together insights from key figures in the collections industry and observation at one of ... more Drawing together insights from key figures in the collections industry and observation at one of the UK’s largest debt purchasers, this paper opens-up the socio-material mechanisms of ‘market attachment’ through which, drawing on Franck Cochoy, the potential ‘captation’ of the defaulting consumer credit debtor occurs. It begins by setting out the analytical deficits in the contemporary analysis of consumer debt collection practices, before tracing the industry’s responses to the particular problematic of consumer collections. It focuses on the role played by the ‘capture of affect’ in collections processes, building on existing work exploring socio-economic objects that may be described as ‘non-representational’. A richer understanding of the relationship between markets and the body is thus brought to Actor-Network Theory influenced studies of processes of ‘economization’. It follows the debtor’s progress along collections ‘trajectories’, exploring different not necessarily compatible modes of captation being deployed by collectors attempting to enact defaulters as repayers, ranging from the quasi-therapeutic to the disciplinary. It concludes by examining the increasing role for performative forms of in vitro and in vivo experimentation being deployed in the collections process, through the use of econometric modelling techniques. Both the debtor’s past and their actions as they move through the present are shown to provide the empirical grounding for a process of repeated affective ‘testing’, aimed at discovering—and profiting from—minute variations in debtor dispositions.

Hawkins, G., Gabrys, J. and Michael, M. (eds): Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic, Jul 2013

All monetary objects – credit cards as much as bank notes and coins – are material things that ca... more All monetary objects – credit cards as much as bank notes and coins – are material things that can be considered as ‘economic devices’. The success of the particular transactional object depends on the security and predictability of its relations with a diverse and complex range of associated actors, both human and non-human. Yet monetary devices themselves can shape the course of economic action. This chapter focuses on objects at the ‘frontline’ of many forms of consumer credit enabled economic exchange: the plastic cards that smooth so many people’s passages through consumer spaces are a recognizable part of our everyday lives. It argues that not enough attention has been paid to how monetary mediums might be important in shaping social and economic life. It focuses on historical emergence of the plastic card in the United States, showing the way in which plastic and its specific socio-material affordances have, in different and changing ways, mattered in the history of the payment card and in creditors’ engagements with users, including playing a key role in accelerating the first major credit card boom. The chapter then moves to the United Kingdom, exploring the role of the card not in moments of borrowing, but at times of default – that is, when consumer credit borrowers, for whatever reason, are unable (or unwilling) to meet their obligations to repay. In these situations, as the chapter shows, the cards themselves can become the targets of micropolitical forms of protest, directing attention towards what usually goes unremarked: that the accumulation of billions of dollars of consumer credit debt not only depends on, but has been stimulated by, the accumulation in so many everyday lives of millions of superficially unremarkable plastic cards.

Disasters and Politics: Materials, Preparedness and Governance (Sociological Review Monograph Series), 2014

This article analyzes how shelters act as a form of concrete governmentality. Shelters, like othe... more This article analyzes how shelters act as a form of concrete governmentality. Shelters, like other forms of preparedness, are political acts in the absence of a disaster. They are materializations and visualizations of risk calculations. Shelters as a type of concrete governmentality pose the question of how to build something that lasts and resists, and remains relevant both when the object that is being resisted keeps changing and when the very act of building intervenes so publicly in the life of the restless surrounding population. Comparing shelters in India, Switzerland and the UK, we highlight three transformations of preparedness that shelters trigger. First we analyse how shelters compose preparedness by changing the relationship between the state and its citizens. Rather than simply limiting risk or introducing ‘safety’, the building of shelters poses questions about who needs protection and why and, as we will show, this can generate controversy. Second, we analyse how shelters decompose preparedness by falling out of use. Third, we focus on struggles to recompose preparedness: Changing ideas about disasters thus lead to shelters being suddenly out of place, or needing to adapt.

In preparation

Recent discourses on risk have focused on the question of the relationship between preparedness a... more Recent discourses on risk have focused on the question of the relationship between preparedness and knowledge, with a particular focus on the role and feasibility of calculation in relation to seemingly incalculable threats (e.g. Beck 1992, Collier 2008, Ericson and Doyle 2004). In this article, we focus on one such threat: nuclear war. However, rather than taking the threat as given, and proceeding to analyse responses to that threat, we look at how risks are produced. Risk production, in our terms, refers to a generic process of transforming uncertainty and danger into an object of thought, analysis and management, as well as quite simply, into things. Drawing on Luhmann (2002), we argue that this process needs to be understood in relation to how risk production becomes entangled with the attribution of consequential human actions. We compare how two countries -- the UK and Switzerland -- produced risk across a period ranging from 1970 to the present. To do so, we distinguish between three different mechanisms of risk production. The first is risk assessment: this includes both formal modes of risk calculation as well as a range of less technical weighings of risk. Second is risk materialisation: this is a risk transferred into a potentially visible, socio-material entity, ranging from seemingly permanent physical entities to those more obviously dependent on ongoing socio-cultural and organisational processes. And finally, third, is risk illocution: this is risk made through statements, a mode of linguistic performativity explored most notably by John L. Austin. Drawing on each of these, we show that during the cold war, both Switzerland and the UK did not calculate between risks. Rather, they both produced a singular risk, namely nuclear war, but in different ways. Switzerland materialized this risk in a system of ‘total defence’, including a huge network of bunkers. Only after having performed this choice, were complex risk calculations about the effectiveness of bunkers undertaken. In the UK, the government embarked on a course of delegitimizing its own singular risk assessment by building nuclear weapons while not providing any credible form of either concrete or organisational protection from the effects of a nuclear attack. Finally, we show how the consequences of these different productions of risk as both countries tried to move towards an all encompassing ‘all hazards’ approach to risk after the end of the cold war. In so doing, we show how past materialised productions of risk retain the potential to interfere and intervene with risk that is being done according to a new, quite different organisational logic.

CSISP working paper, 2013

This paper draws on our experience of working on a comparative project entitled “Organising Disas... more This paper draws on our experience of working on a comparative project entitled “Organising Disaster. Civil Protection and the Population", trying to find the ‘same, same but different’ in our cases. This has directed our attention to two questions: Who or more appropriately what is the comparator? And how does the comparator affect a researcher’s relationship with the objects being compared? Conventionally the term ‘comparator’ is understood as a standard against which an object is compared. However, in electrical engineering a ‘comparator’ is a device – now often a chip – that does comparison. The comparator, in our appropriation of the word, is an actor that undertakes the work of comparison. It has to be assembled from diverse entities, according to specific forms of knowledge and expertise. In order to produce the comparative output, these assembled parts have to actively intervene and provoke relations between previously uncompared inputs. The creative figure of comparator is largely absent from social scientific literature focused on comparison, tending to remain invisible and undeclared. We therefore see the question as follows: what are the procedures being used to produce the very act of comparison?

Du lien marchand : comment le marché fait société : Essai(s) de sociologie économique relationniste, 2012

Comment les marchés engagent-ils et génèrent-ils de la valeur en traitant avec consommateurs dont... more Comment les marchés engagent-ils et génèrent-ils de la valeur en traitant avec consommateurs dont la capacité et le désir de continuer à participer aux échanges marchands sont affaiblis ? Ce chapitre pose cette question en s’intéressant aux pratiques de l’industrie du recouvrement des dettes de crédit à la consommation pour valoriser monétairement des emprunteurs défaillants. Se basant sur les chiffres décrivant l’industrie du recouvrement et des observations chez l’un des plus importants racheteurs de dette britannique, nous déplierons les mécanismes socio-matériels des « attachements marchands » à travers lesquels s’opère la potentielle captation – selon le concept de Franck Cochoy – des emprunteurs de crédit à la consommation. Nous plaidons pour l’élargissement du territoire empirique sur lequel ces processus doivent être suivis, en nous fondant sur les travaux existants qui explorent des objets socio-économiques décrits comme « non-figuratifs ». Nous cherchons donc à contribuer au programme « d’économisation » issu des théories de l’acteur-réseau en lui apportant une meilleure compréhension des liens entre le marché et les corps. Le chapitre suit la progression du débiteur au cours des « trajectoires » de recouvrement et explore les modes de captation multiples et non nécessairement compatibles déployés par les collecteurs qui tentent de transformer les emprunteurs défaillants en bons payeurs, avec des modes de relation allant de traitements quasi-thérapeuthiques à disciplinaires. Nous concluons en examinant le rôle grandissant de formes d’expériences performatives in vivo et in vitro déployées dans le processus de recouvrement à l’aide de techniques de modélisation économétriques. Les actions passées et présentes du débiteur sont prises en compte pour fournir le substrat empirique d’un processus répété d’examens affectifs destiné à découvrir les (et à profiter des) variations minuscules des dispositions des débiteurs.

Goldsmiths Working Paper, 2008

Book Reviews by Joe Deville

Sociology, 2007

) xii + 314pp. A wander around the fruit and vegetable section of a typical British supermarket q... more ) xii + 314pp. A wander around the fruit and vegetable section of a typical British supermarket quickly reveals how visible and contested the category of consumer seems to be becoming in this country-in food retailing at least. Union Jacks proudly herald the Britishness of select produce, whilst others proclaim their 'organic' heritage, or their participation in 'fair' methods of trade. Amongst the complex interplay of factors feeding into the calculations around what and whether to buy, groups of British consumers are being asked to incorporate debates around, for example, the ethics of trade, environmentalism and patriotism.

The Sociology of Debt, 2019

Geoforum, 2019

Speculative research: The lure of possible futures, 2017

British Journal of Sociology, 2017

Markets and the Arts of Attachment, 2017

The Book of Payments Historical and Contemporary Views on the Cashless Society, 2016

New Formations, 2016

Algorithmic Life: Calculative Devices in the Age of Big Data (Edited by Louise Amoore & Volha Piotukh), 2015

Cultural Studies, 2015

Consumption Markets and Culture, 2014

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2012

Hawkins, G., Gabrys, J. and Michael, M. (eds): Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic, Jul 2013

Disasters and Politics: Materials, Preparedness and Governance (Sociological Review Monograph Series), 2014

In preparation

CSISP working paper, 2013

Du lien marchand : comment le marché fait société : Essai(s) de sociologie économique relationniste, 2012

Goldsmiths Working Paper, 2008

Sociology, 2007

The Commons and Care, 2018

Might now be the moment to more carefully reconsider the relationships between the university and... more Might now be the moment to more carefully reconsider the relationships between the university and academic publishing, and academic book publishing in particular? As one of the editors of the scholar-led open access book publisher Mattering Press, this is a question that I have been thinking about for some time and has been thrown into sharper relief by the recent wave of industrial action that hit large numbers of universities in the UK in early 2018. I will come onto discuss publishing shortly, but first a quick primer on the strikes and some of the issues they brought to the surface. In terms of their stated objectives – to challenge the major reductions to the pensions of university staff – the success of the strikes remains to be seen. At the time of writing, the industrial action is suspended pending a new valuation of the pension scheme agreed jointly between the union and universities, a process which many of those that participated in the strikes are sceptical about. Nonetheless as has been widely observed, the strikes have, at least for some, been something of a watershed in how staff, and perhaps particularly academic staff, consider their relationships to universities and to each other. Of the many hashtags that became associated with the strike on Twitter, #WeAreTheUniversity was one of the most prominent. It spoke to the increasing sense of alienation from their own institutions that many academics (in the UK, but I'm quite sure elsewhere too) feel. This is a result of a complex mix of pressures, but prominent amongst these is what Clive Barnet, writing on the strike, has referred to as 'the increasingly toxic mess of top-down, vicious, paternalist, patronising management systems that has come to characterise university life' (Barnett 2018). It would be hard to find an academic working in UK higher education who has not at some point been frustrated by these management systems, and especially the multiple and sometimes contradictory 'orders of worth' (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006 [1991]) they have instituted, used to measure academics' performance, and in particular their scholarly output. The most significant driver of this is the demand imposed by government agencies on universities to periodically demonstrate the quality of their research as part of the six-yearly Research Excellence Framework (REF) audit exercise. This, however, does not excuse the enthusiasm with which various components of university bureaucracy have embraced the metricisation of scholarly production. Particularly egregious, at least in my view, is the widely criticised ii practice employed by some faculties of using externally compiled journal lists to measure academic quality. These attempt to provide an apparently 'objective' measure of the quality of outputs published within a particular field and are increasingly becoming tied to promotions criteria and other performance incentives. iii The increasing reliance on such lists, alongside a variety of other ways in which attempts are being made to instrumentalise academic knowledge production, pose a threat to a variety of forms of scholarship. This extends most obviously to journals: publications that are either excluded from or poorly ranked within such lists are likely to suffer if the grip of such logics becomes tighter. Within this, open access journals are particularly threatened: in the game of the metric-driven measurement of academic value, it is certainly possible, perhaps likely, that the least institutionalised and least resourced journals will struggle. But there are threats too to unconventional book publishing practices, of which open access initiatives are perhaps most prominent. If in some faculties publishing books is already a risky enough endeavour, why, many colleagues will ask, should they compound the issue by moving beyond commercial book publishers, at least in part given the reputational risks this might entail?

The Conversation, Jul 9, 2015

Open Democracy, Jun 9, 2015

The Conversation, Jan 27, 2015

The Conversation, Jul 4, 2014

CSISP Online, Jun 18, 2014

Science and Technology Studies (STS) has a long-standing interest in analysing the politics of kn... more Science and Technology Studies (STS) has a long-standing interest in analysing the politics of knowledge production. One of its strengths has been the demonstration of the contingencies, blindspots and power-plays that are wrapped up in the creation, standardisation, and distribution of knowledge about the world across a variety of domains. STS has, however, been less good in confronting the challenge that the rise of digital publishing and the Open Access (OA) movement poses to the conditions of its own forms of knowledge production and distribution. This is the encounter that was staged at a workshop that took place at Goldsmiths on the 20 th March earlier this year, organised and hosted by CSISP. Titled 'Experiments in Knowledge Production: Open Access and the Politics of the Digital Academy', the event brought together a range of OA publishing initiatives to provide case studies and provocations for examining how some of these challenges are being confronted in practice. It was an attempt to test the usefulness of thinking of such initiatives as knowledge production experiments.

EASST Review (34(2)) , Dec 2013

Subscription: Full individual membership fee (waged and resident in high income countries): EUR 4... more Subscription: Full individual membership fee (waged and resident in high income countries): EUR 40 annual. Students, unwaged or resident in all other countries pay a reduced fee of EUR 25. Library rate is EUR 45. Please note that subscriptions can be made through the EASST website by following the 'Join EASST' link.

The Transactions Archive, Aug 16, 2013

The [credit] card was no more than a device bearing symbols for the exchange of monetary value. T... more The [credit] card was no more than a device bearing symbols for the exchange of monetary value. That it took the form of a piece of plastic was nothing but an accident of time and circumstance. We were really in the business of the exchange of monetary value. ).

The Conversation, May 28, 2013

Socializing Finance, Feb 10, 2009